New Terrain

[Questdog]

I love this mod, but I can't play it with this new terrain. It's hideous looking to me; like someone blew groceries all over my map.....

Is there anyway to get the Blue Marble textures to work in this?

 

[Mega Nix]

you need to apply the option "detailed terrain" in graphic settings ingame

 

[JosEPh_II]

..... :/ ......

 

[Mega Nix]

oh i misunderstood the question. I think also its a bit over the top, more of the terrain should be "Vanilla" two or three times more, and imo that would be good enough

 

[Epona222]

I really like it the way it is now, if I want to play a game with flat green baize, I'll play snooker...

 

[Questdog]

I have recolored the new terrain and added some of the Blue Marble textures. It looks a lot better in my opinion:



What do you think?

 

[Hydromancerx]

Its too hard to tell the terrains apart. I strongly disagree with your changes. I do not want them changed from what they are now.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

If I could figure out which bits are which, I would probably agree with you. My problem with the new terrain is that it tastes bad to me.

Post what you have done so I can play with it a bit.

 

[Questdog]

The File is too large (12 MB) to post. Here is a labeled pic:



It took me a while to get it right, because the texture names don't match up with the terrains.

Edit: I made it .7z and it was half the size of a zip so here it is:

 

[Hydromancerx]

See now desert and dunes look the same. And the barren looks nothing like black volcanic soil. No to mention there is no rusty-red terrain anywhere. It looks so plain and dull now. Plus the rock formations now don't match since they were made to match the rocky and desert terrain of Dune Wars.

Post what you have done so I can play with it a bit.

Please don't change them. Especially the Barren one since I made that one.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

The File is too large (12 MB) to post. Here is a labeled pic:

View attachment 302510

It took me a while to get it right, because the texture names don't match up with the terrains.

Edit: I made it .7z and it was half the size of a zip so here it is:

I like it but I will have to see what they look like on my machine. The other problem I have with some of the new ones is that they are flat.

 

[Hydromancerx]

After looking through them all they all look so dull and brown. If I wanted dull looking terrain I would not have asked for more terrain types. The original terrain or even blue marble would have done the job. The point of adding all the new terrain types was to get some more variety of types of terrain, especially in the color that they are. Everything from the red-rusty iron rich desert types to the golden dunes. Green rich lush terrain to the black volcanic barren terrain.

I beg you guys don't change the terrain. If you want to add to it its fine, but don't take away the wonderful color diversity we now have in our terrain.

 

[Questdog]

After looking through them all they all look so dull and brown. If I wanted dull looking terrain I would not have asked for more terrain types. The original terrain or even blue marble would have done the job. The point of adding all the new terrain types was to get some more variety of types of terrain, especially in the color that they are. Everything from the red-rusty iron rich desert types to the golden dunes. Green rich lush terrain to the black volcanic barren terrain.

I beg you guys don't change the terrain. If you want to add to it its fine, but don't take away the wonderful color diversity we now have in our terrain.

I think you've made you're position clear.

I'm not advocating that my scheme become the default one. I just made it for myself and thought there might be others who appreciate a more subdued look to the map. The default look is just way too jarring for me and looks nothing like real terrain. The desert looks like Georgia clay, the barren looks like a parking lot, and the muddy looks like some kind of chocolate/sherbet swirl.

You guys can make it look any way you want and as long as I have the opportunity to mod it for myself, I don't care if you want to play on a Jackson Pollock painting......

P.S. Salt Flats shouldn't appear on hills....

 

[AIAndy]

Having alternative terrain graphic sets is fine. That way everyone can use the one he prefers.

 

[Hydromancerx]

I think you've made you're position clear.

I'm not advocating that my scheme become the default one. I just made it for myself and thought there might be others who appreciate a more subdued look to the map. The default look is just way too jarring for me and looks nothing like real terrain. The desert looks like Georgia clay, the barren looks like a parking lot, and the muddy looks like some kind of chocolate/sherbet swirl.

You guys can make it look any way you want and as long as I have the opportunity to mod it for myself, I don't care if you want to play on a Jackson Pollock painting......

P.S. Salt Flats shouldn't appear on hills....

I do not know about Georgia clay but I do know of places like Arizona, Hawaii and Australia that have red dirt/sand for their desert.

As for the muddy it reminds me of the Andes terrain from AOE3. I would not be surprised if it was taken from that.

While it its true that "Salt Flats" do not happen on hills, there are salt mounds and formations like at Mono Lake.

And I find the new terrain looks very organic on the perfect world maps. Some of the others look blotchy, but I think that's more of the map scripts fault.

 

[Koshling]

Having alternative terrain graphic sets is fine. That way everyone can use the one he prefers.

There is some evidence building up that the new terrain graphics (complexity? Variance? Unknown) are giving rise to the stuttering that is being reported. An alternate set which is much simpler (and possibly even shares graphics for similar things) to cater for machines that have this issue might be a good idea.

 

[Questdog]

I do not know about Georgia clay but I do know of places like Arizona, Hawaii and Australia that have red dirt/sand for their desert.

As for the muddy it reminds me of the Andes terrain from AOE3. I would not be surprised if it was taken from that.

While it its true that "Salt Flats" do not happen on hills, there are salt mounds and formations like at Mono Lake.

And I find the new terrain looks very organic on the perfect world maps. Some of the others look blotchy, but I think that's more of the map scripts fault.

My problems with the red desert:

1) It does not look like sand; it looks like clay
2) You cannot have two different kinds of desert in Civ 4. The desert terrain and dune terrain are used side by side in the desert in Civ 4 so that ALL deserts become a mix of the red and yellow. If you could use either/or for a desert then it would make sense to have two different and unrelated textures. But since the two textures must reside adjacent to one another on the map, it makes no sense that one be from the Sahara and one be from Australia.

 

[AIAndy]

An idea I had was to have terrain varieties like there are feature varieties (although those are mainly used for forest only).
That means terrain that has different art but the same behavior.
Map scripts would place the functional terrain like normal (so no changes to them). Then some code would run to replace some of that terrain with the varieties according to rules.
It would allow to have terrain art that is only meant to smoothen certain terrain combinations or different desert looks in different areas of the world.

There are some difficulties though:
- That extra terrain would need art
- If with the terrain we have the engine gets problems already, it might not support that many different terrain arts.
- The varieties would probably need to be full terrains but the access functions need to be modified so the graphics engine sees the variety but all functional code in the dll or Python gets the mother terrain.

 

[Koshling]

An idea I had was to have terrain varieties like there are feature varieties (although those are mainly used for forest only).
That means terrain that has different art but the same behavior.
Map scripts would place the functional terrain like normal (so no changes to them). Then some code would run to replace some of that terrain with the varieties according to rules.
It would allow to have terrain art that is only meant to smoothen certain terrain combinations or different desert looks in different areas of the world.

There are some difficulties though:
- That extra terrain would need art
- If with the terrain we have the engine gets problems already, it might not support that many different terrain arts.
- The varieties would probably need to be full terrains but the access functions need to be modified so the graphics engine sees the variety but all functional code in the dll or Python gets the mother terrain.

Visually I prefer the suggested replacement, though I take Hydro's points also (it IS a matter of personal taste). Functionally, the stuttering issue makes me think that a greatly simplified set is also needed. So, all in all, I am in favour of introducing this change to support mutliple flavors.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

I will make a modular version, and make the current set modular also. I think it will just be the art defines XML files in the modules, but that means I will need to give different id names to the new graphics. The text etc. will b the same.